The Disputed Munich Art Trove

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After an unremarkable life, Cornelius Gurlitt died at the age of 81 on May 6, 2014, but not before he had emerged as the central figure in an international art-world controversy. Two years earlier a court-ordered police raid on his apartment in the gentrified Schwabing district of Munich had uncovered a cache of 121 framed and 1,285 unframed paintings, prints, watercolours, and drawings and piles of documents all believed to have been lost during World War II. The investigation remained private until the German magazine Focus broke the story on Nov. 4, 2013, estimating the value of the horde at €1 billion (about $1.3 billion) and linking it to Gurlitt’s father, Hildebrand, who had worked as an art dealer at the behest of Adolf Hitler’s government. Demands from art scholars and descendants of Holocaust victims for procedural transparency prompted the German government to organize a high-profile task force to address issues of ownership and restitution, but a new complication arose when Gurlitt’s will named the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland as sole heir to the Schwabing Kunstfund (Schwabing [popularly referred to as the Munich] art trove).

Chagall paintingAn unnamed painting by French artist Marc Chagall that had been hidden from view for more than 70 years is projected onto a wall during a press conference on November 5, 2013, about the discovery one year earlier by German authorities of more than 1,400 artworks that had been seized by the Nazis.Michael Dalder—Reuters/Landov

Gurlitt first sparked official suspicion during a routine customs check as he traveled by train from Zürich to Munich on Sept. 22, 2010. The €9,000 (about $11,600) that was found in his possession was within the legal limit, but a further probe disclosed that he did not have tax or pension records. The following year the prosecutor’s office in Augsburg, Ger., obtained a warrant to search his Munich apartment, and the search, carried out between February 28 and March 2, 2012, exposed a total of 1,406 items hidden in a pantrylike room. Pending further investigation, these items were removed to a storage facility in Munich, where they remained in anonymity until the 2013 Focus article revealed that the cache included works by such Modernist masters as Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, Emile Nolde, and Max Beckmann, all of whom had been denounced as degenerate artists by the Third Reich.

Hildebrand Gurlitt (1895–1956) had a checkered career as a museum director and art dealer until he secured an appointment in 1938 with the Commission for Recovery of Seized Degenerate Artworks. From 1933 the government had used the term entartete Kunst (“degenerate art”) to stigmatize art it deemed to be counter to an idealized German identity. This included the works of most contemporary German artists—notably Nolde, Franz Marc, and Beckmann—whom Gurlitt had previously promoted, as well as such international Modernists as Chagall, Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. In order to indoctrinate the public, official exhibitions of degenerate art were staged, the most notorious being the July 1937 “Entartete Kunst” show in Munich, which featured about 600 works by some 120 leading Modernists. The works displayed had been confiscated from German museums and public collections, and many were subsequently sold on the international market by Gurlitt and the other dealers working for the commission to raise foreign currency.

In 1945 the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives (MFA&A; popularly called the Monuments Men) Section of the U.S. Army discovered in a castle at Aschbach, Bavaria, a cache of 112 paintings and 24 drawings, including works by Chagall, Beckmann, and Otto Dix, as well as eight crates of sculptures and miscellaneous decorative items, all registered in Hildebrand Gurlitt’s name. Gurlitt asked for consideration, claiming the items as the remains of his personal collection and explaining that all other works in his possession, as well as the pertinent documentation, had been destroyed in the Allied bombing raids on Dresden, Ger. By 1951 the MFA&A had granted the Aschbach cache to Gurlitt; nothing more surfaced about this collection until November 2013, when in response to the Focus feature, Marc Masurovsky, founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, cited documents in the U.S. National Archives, College Park, Md., that listed works in the Aschbach cache that were identified to be contained in the far-more-substantial Schwabing trove.

The perspective of the Focus feature—an elderly eccentric recluse guarding the most valuable art horde recovered in the postwar era—caused a media sensation that distracted from the essential questions of the case: Why did the authorities suppress information about the find? How complicit was Gurlitt? Who owned the works? Within days, the heirs of Paul Rosenberg (1881–1959), a Parisian art dealer who had represented French Modernists, mounted a claim for Matisse’s painting Femme assise (1921). More works linked to Gurlitt appeared. On November 9 police removed 22 items from the Stuttgart, Ger., apartment of Gurlitt’s brother-in-law, Nikolaus Frässle; in February 2014 more than 60 artworks, including some by major French Impressionists, were found in Gurlitt’s second home, in Salzburg, Austria. To deal with the expected flood of questions and claimants, the German government quickly organized the “Schwabing Art Trove” Task Force, headed by Ingeborg Berggreen-Merkel, former deputy minister of state to the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, and including representatives from the Jewish Claims Conference and the Holocaust Era Asset Restitution Taskforce (Project HEART). The mandate of the task force was to answer and advise in matters of provenance and procedure and to conduct research rather than to attempt restitution. It was not empowered to decide on claims. A team of scholars, led by Uwe Hartmann, began the daunting challenge of identifying the “degenerate” works and tracing their provenance. To demonstrate commitment to transparency, the task force quickly posted 25 works on a Web site (www.lostart.de) and promised more entries as the research progressed.

In his sole interview, published in Der Spiegel magazine on Nov. 17, 2013, Gurlitt came across as earnest, frail, and slightly befuddled, intent on clearing his father’s reputation and regaining possession of his collection. As his mother’s sole heir, Gurlitt had held the paintings in his possession since the late 1960s, and under German law the statute of limitations on claims had expired after 30 years. The discovery in December that just two years earlier he had sold Beckmann’s Lion Tamer for €864,000 (about $1,227,000) at the Kunsthaus Lempertz in Cologne, Ger., suggested that Gurlitt drew income from the artworks and cast doubts on his motives. Later that month, after Gurlitt had been hospitalized, the court appointed Christoph Edel as his custodian. Gurlitt promised full cooperation, but he hired his own lawyers in January and set up a Web site (www.gurlitt.info) to tell his side of the story. On April 7, 2014, after a series of legal disputes, Gurlitt signed an agreement with the Bavarian State Ministry of Justice and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media to relinquish those items shown by the task force’s research to have been taken from their owners during the Third Reich. Works with a clean provenance would be returned to Gurlitt.

Plagued by a chronic heart condition, Gurlitt had struggled as his health deteriorated dramatically after surgery in March. He was released from the hospital on his own insistence and remained in his Schwabing flat under round-the-clock care until his death on May 6. His will, written in January, came as a shock to many, including Matthias Frehner, the director of the Kunstmuseum Bern, who described the bequest as “a bolt from the blue” as well as a great “burden of responsibility.” Before any artworks could be transferred, however, the task force had to conclude its research; it estimated that the investigation of the 970 works suspected of having a “degenerate” provenance would not be finished before year’s end and was likely to take much longer to complete. The first claimant case was resolved when the Matisse painting, valued at $20 million, was awarded to the Rosenberg heirs on June 11, despite competing claims. Just two days earlier, nearly 65 years after the Monuments Men work concluded, U.S. Pres. Barack Obama signed legislation to award a Congressional Gold Medal to them. Only six survivors—Harry Ettlinger, Richard Barancik, Horace Apgar, Bernard Taper, Anne Oliver Popham Bell, and Lennox Teirney—remained. The film The Monuments Men (2014) dramatized the title characters’ efforts to locate and retrieve artworks looted by the Nazis.